Houston Texans blitz numbers: Part 5 of Football Outsiders chat

[This blog post continues the Texans talk with Football Outsiders Managing Editor, Bill Barnwell. Click to find Part 1 (Dunta Robinson and secondary), Part 2 (Projected wins, improvement of the Jaguars, Hurricane Ike effects on predictions), Part 3 (Improving the Texans red zone performance) Part 4 (Texans defensive predictions). We are discussing questions I had about Texans-related topics in the 2009 Football Outsiders Almanac.]

Stephanie Stradley: “Could you talk some about the idiosyncratic blitz tendencies of last year’s Texans that show up in your 2009 FOA data? Could some of these tendencies be explained by the times the Texans defense was able to get into obvious passing downs?”

Bill Barnwell: “The Texans weren’t significantly awful at getting into passing situations last year, just below-average. It’s hard to define that sort of context, but let’s go with number of plays against a defense that were either second or third down with eight or more yards to go.

The Texans had 234 instances of such a play, but we also have to adjust the figure for the number of total plays the team went up against. Houston was only on the field for 924 passes and runs a year ago (filtering out things like Hail Mary attempts and kneels), meaning that 25.3% of their meaningful defensive snaps were in those passing situations. The league average was 26.3% — Houston had the ninth-lowest percentage of snaps in that situation.

The blitzing results we found are pretty remarkable, though. The Texans were 31st in the league in pass defense DVOA when they rushed four — regardless of whether it was a zone blitz or simply a straight rush of four down linemen.

As they rushed more players, their lot improved. When the Texans rushed five, they had the tenth best pass defense DVOA in the league; when they got all the way up to six, they were the second-best pass defense DVOA in the league (relative to when every other team in the league blitzed the same number of players).

Why is that? It’s always difficult to pick one specific factor in these chicken-or-the-egg scenarios, but I’d figure that it was the pass rush. Mario Williams has 12 sacks, but the rest of the team had a combined total of 13. That’s just not acceptable, especially considering the double-teams that Williams was enduring. If you only rush four and don’t get any pressure on the quarterback, your secondary’s going to be in coverage until someone gets open, and that doesn’t work at any level of football. Houston only hurried the quarterback on 11.4 percent of dropbacks last year, 20th in the league.

Adding Antonio Smith will help, but it’s pretty clear that Houston would benefit from blitzing a little more frequently.”

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The few times that the Texans and the blitz has been written about for next year’s defense, it’s been said that they want the defense to be more aggressive but that this doesn’t mean necessarily more blitzing. MLB DeMeco Ryans suggests that the changes that have been made in the offseason allow them to play “faster.”

I’m guessing that is a reference to ditching the read and react defense that former-DC Richard Smith ran, though I am surmising the details are more involved than that.

Teams prefer a four man rush because good quarterbacks can take advantage of +4 blitzes. Some of the best pass rushes in the game, however, come from those four man blitzes because the defensive line is so dominant. The Titans for years have been such a team. But you have to have the personal across the line to be able to do that. I’m not sure that the Texans this year have that, but I think they are closer than last year.

So what do you as close observers of the team and/or the league think of these numbers?

[And sorry about the technical problems that some people have been facing with getting the comments to go through.Don’t take it personally, it was a setup error somewhere in the system. I’ve been informed by the powers that be that has been fixed. And also, I was a bit slow with checking out comments because I was doing some interesting (at least to me) non-Texans, NFL writing at FanHouse today here and here. Not happy silly writing but I think some of you who read everything NFL might think is a good read. I’m overdue for happy silly blogging and will save that energy for the blog here on the weekend, I hope.]